Marriage Is No Longer the Goal but the Means & Looping the Idols

DJs Branka and Sedyst invite us to a place that
lies somewhere between a dance hall and a movie theatre, in which they combine
elements of pop culture from various immigrant and non-immigrant communities.
They play with assigned identities, appropriations, and re-presentations of
present-day North European settings, as well as pronounced breaking points,
escapes, and provocations.
Visually their show follows two thematic lines. In Marriage Is No Longer the Goal but the Means, we see clips of weddings – from weddings as a means of bringing
families together, a meeting-place for often complete strangers, and the
beginning of a new life for arranged partners in Alamanya; to the ‘paper
marriages’ of political relatives that were popular in the eighties; right up
to pioneering gay and lesbian immigrant couples in the current decade. This
process shows that marriage is, on the one hand, continually becoming more
institutionalised even as, on the other hand, it is being intelligently defied.
Looping the Idols covers and confronts a wide spectrum of popular films from the
seventies and eighties: gangster flicks from Yesilcam (the Turkish Hollywood),
‘Blaxploitation’ movies, and films from Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia.
These films all show the processes through which gendered minority identities
are established. They also reveal the performances and survival strategies of
gendered and racialised subjects. The popularisation of home video has played a
very important role in the lives of immigrant families in Northern Europe.
Movies that people could not find on national television stations can be rented
from the local video store in immigrant neighbourhoods, enabling them to see,
anytime they want, their favourite idols on their small screen. Looping the
Idols re-contextualises these films and their viewers. As for their music, DJ
Sedyst and DJ Branka mix and infuse various electronic styles with oriental
sounds and pop. Concatenations of ear-disturbing melodies are resolved in
familiarised or bastardised pop. The privileged listener/clubber – the one who
can always enjoy his or her music – is being deconstructed.